Tag Archives: Stephanie Bibb

Self-Publishing “1000 Words” – The Carrier

An update on my “1000 Words” project.

For Snow Witch, once the free trial wore off, there were no more downloads of this story (except the one I bought as a gift for my fiance). As such, I’m currently looking at two possibilities: see if sales increase once other short stories are available for free, or make it free as well, and only make the actual, final anthology cost money. (I’m thinking $2.99 sounds like a decent price). Right now I’m waiting to hear back from Amazon/Kindle as to whether there is a way to make it free on Kindle, or if I should simply remove the story so I can make it free on Smashwords.

Either way, I plan to hold off on publishing any of the other short stories on Kindle until the full anthology is complete.

This is largely due to time. It wasn’t until yesterday that I realized that our final project is due on April 27th, the last day of regular classes before finals. Figure in two weeks for printing shipping a book, and that means I need to have completed the book by April 14th… a week from now. On the bright side, I guess I could do expedited shipping.

While I originally planned to do a large photobook version of “1000 Words” to showcase the completed book covers and stories, I’m starting to think that working with just the trade paperback version might be the best option.

Today I self-published the short story, The Carrier on Smashwords. Formatting was much smoother after having already done the formatting for Snow Witch. The one downside to running out of time to complete these stories, however, is not having as much time to find a proofreader. As such, I did extra proof reading of the story myself, and did it over a span of several weeks.

Once all the stories are completed, I do hope to find another proofreader for the whole anthology, or to look over it again myself, to try to catch anything I missed during this initial phase.

The benefit to going ahead and publishing it, though, is that it gives me the feeling that I must move on to the next story, regardless of if there might be more tweaks to be made. But if I were doing this for future projects, especially if it were a novel, I’d definitely want to find beta readers before it went live.

At the time of typing, The Carrier has had nine downloads, and no reviews (neither has Snow Witch). I just hope it is enjoyable. 🙂

Anyways, the statistics of the project is as follows:

2 Stories completed.

5 Stories written but not edited.

3 Stories still need to be written.

4 Book Covers completed.

2 Book Covers near completion.

4 Book Covers still need to be designed.

Snow Witch: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/139780

The Carrier: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/149719

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Secret Agent Photoshoot – Jake

This is a photoshoot I did with Jake, intending to create images that would work well for an FBI/CIA/Secret Agent look. While I ended up steering away from that, I did get the image for one of my stronger Honors College Project book covers. Part of the the agreement with Jake was that I’d also do a few potrait ones, so that’s also included. Of course… I had fun transforming one portrait into that of seafolk. 🙂

This was done using my alien bee studio lights.

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sbibb/sets/72157629734197803/show/

SBibb - Secret Agent Photoshoot

SBibb - Secret Agent Photoshoot

SBibb - Secret Agent Photoshoot

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Fantasy Warrior Photoshoot – Christina

This was a photoshoot I did with Christina. The idea was to have a fantasy warrior/mage character, and we went over to Culp Park when the weather turned unexpectedly nice. I was looking to get “video game action poses,” and it turned out to be really fun. I came back with over a thousand pictures to sort through. Got it down to 100 images, then finally twenty favorites. These are the resulting images. 🙂

Flickr Slideshow: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sbibb/sets/72157629206245630/show/

SBibb - Fantasy Warrior

SBibb - Fantasy Warrior

SBibb - Fantasy Warrior

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Additions to the Blog

If you noticed a bunch of new links appear on the side bar of the blog, that’s because I decided to try posting links that I thought might be helpful. This includes my favorite Author/Agent sites, since I’m interested in writing, as well as book cover design sites, since I’m hoping to go into that as a profession. I’ll also include other various links that I find useful or interesting.

 

Also, I now have a like button on my blog for those of you interested in facebook. ( http://www.facebook.com/sbibbphoto ) 🙂

 

Enjoy, and let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see or hear more about.

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Self-Publishing 1000 Words – Snow Witch is on Smashwords

SBibb - Snow Witch Cover

I have completed the cover for Snow Witch and finished formatting the short story for Smashwords. (Next up will be a Kindle edition). It is now up on Smashwords. The process felt surprisingly easy, and I only had one issue (had to change it from .docx to .doc), but the solution was easily remedied. I’m currently reading through and getting the hang of sales versus downloads, but hopefully it will work out well. I’m not sure if downloads also includes downloads of the sample.

Since Smashwords currently has a sitewide promotion going on this month for downloading an ebook, I choose to give “Snow Witch” the option to be downloaded for free. I’m hoping to entice people to download and review it, but we’ll see if anything comes of it. I missed the first half of the promotion, though, so it will only be free for three days, until March 10th. I would be curious to know how many people are interested in it because of the cover, and how many people are interested in the story due to the short description.

I also posted a note about it on my photo illustration Facebook page, made an announcement via Absolute Write’s announcements forum, and posted it here to my WordPress blog. I currently have two sales, one with the Smashwords coupon, and one an actual purchase. I’m not sure if the actual purchase was intentional or not. I’ll be curious to see how it tracks for the next few days (and will probably have to tell myself not to keep checking Smashwords’ dashboard for updates).

Next up is to create the Kindle edition, and then I need to edit and write the next short stories to be published. One down, nine to go.

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Filed under Book Covers, Business Ventures, Photo Illustration, Writing

Self-Publishing “1000 Words” Project – A Collection of Short Stories

For my capstone honors college project, I elected to merge both my major and minor together. I’m a photography major with a creative writing minor, and for my photography I have a special interest in book cover design and photomanipulation.

Therefore, I decided to create a project consisting of ten short stories, each approximately 1000 words long, which would each be illustrated with a book cover. The title of the project, 1000 Words, comes from the phrase, “a picture’s worth a thousand words.”

While I will be creating a print, photobook version of all ten stories as the completion point, I realized I needed some sort of motivation to write, edit, and illustrate each individual short story.

Enter self-publishing.

I’ve long had an interest in self-publishing, but I also want to try the traditional route, and intend to start off trying traditional for my novels. Now, with the advent of ebooks, I want to try selling the short stories as a side project. Part of this is because I will be using my own first printing rights for the project, and the other part is to help me get a feel for the process and book cover design in order to aid future clients.

So I decided that I will create an e-version of each short story, and self-publish them as I complete them through Smashwords and Kindle. I’ll start off using Smashwords so that I can learn the formatting, then create a Kindle version afterwards.

I am currently planning to price each one at .99 cents, then once all of them are written, compile them into the final anthology called 1000 Words. I have not yet decided on its price, though I’m considering $2.99 and $3.99 at this point in time.

I honestly don’t expect to make any money off of this, especially since I have little in the way of marketing planned. I do intend to announce on my facebook page when I release a story, but seeing as how I have few followers on the business page, I’m not sure how effective that will be.

Also, I am hoping to offer a promotion of a couple day free downloading period (or give coupons to those who ask) for friends or people who might be interested in reviewing the short stories. I have considered leaving one story free once I get multiple stories uploaded.

In the meantime, my first short story slated to be published (hopefully by the end of this week), is “Snow Witch.” A young witch ventures outside of her town for the first time in hopes of transferring her brother’s illness to a willing creature.

I’m in the process of reviewing the short story (which I posted in AW’s Share Your Work forums) and I’m also currently editing the book cover to make it the best I can. 🙂

Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts. I’m hoping that sharing the process will be helpful to multiple people. 🙂

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Like Me On Facebook and Book Cover Design Services

As a quick update, I have now created a Facebook page! It is an easy way to follow my work, as I will update it with pictures from each photoshoot. 🙂

http://www.facebook.com/sbibbphoto

Also, I now have book cover design services listed as a page. Please contact me if you have any questions or want to use my design services. 🙂

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Fantasy Princess Photoshoot – Katie

This was a studio shoot with Katie. 🙂 The idea was to have fantasy princess stock images for my portfolio use, and these were the resulting pictures. The duplicate image is a quick book cover mock-up I did, so you can see how it might be used for a wrap-around book cover. 🙂
SBibb - Fantasy Princess
SBibb - Fantasy Princess
SBibb - Fantasy Princess

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Portrait Sci-Fi Photoshoot – Stacia

A SciFi based photoshoot. My main goal was to get pictures that resembled the main character in my young adult novel I’m writing, Distant Horizon. Stacia modeled for me, and luckily we were able to get the vine armband to work. There’s also a sneak peak at one of the Honors College project book covers I’m working on on Flickr. 🙂

Flickr Slideshow: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sbibb/sets/72157629059771900/show/

SBibb - Sci-Fi Photoshoot - Stacia

SBibb - Sci-Fi Photoshoot - Stacia

SBibb - Sci-Fi Photoshoot - Stacia

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Book Cover Creation – Beyond the Eyes

One of my interests with photography is to create book covers, so my initial thought is to cater to those who are self-publishing or e-publishing. I commonly frequent the writer’s forum Absolute Write (since I’m writing young adult novels myself), and I offered to do a free book cover for someone as practice, and to get a better idea of the process. Today I completed the book cover for Rebekkah, for her upcoming book, Beyond the Eyes. I still need to format it for various uses through e-publishing and promotions, but this is the resulting image. 🙂

You can find her blog here: http://themusingwriter.blogspot.com/

SBibb - Beyond the Eyes cover

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